Tuesday, June 18, 2013Mixed grades for Ohio's teacher prep programsKent State disputes the rankings, but says colleges of education are working on improvementsby WKSU's MOLLY BLOOM

ReporterMolly Bloom

In The Region:

Ohio’s colleges of education graduate about 6,000 new teachers each year. Now a new report says many of those colleges aren’t doing a good job of preparing teachers for the classroom. StateImpact Ohio’s Molly Bloom reports.

Ohio State University is one of just four colleges of education nationwide who's teacher prep programs earned the highest possible grade from the report by National Council on Teacher Quality.

Marietta College and Ohio Northern University also got high marks.

But the report says some teacher ed programs at Kent State University and Cleveland State University do a poor job of preparing future teachers.

Leaders of those schools dispute those ratings.

Dan Mahony leads the college of education at Kent State University and heads Ohio’s association of deans of public colleges of education. He says the council’s ratings don’t look at how well graduates perform in the classroom.

“And if you talk to the people who graduated from our programs, they would give you a far different assessment of how well prepared they were when they went into their first teaching job than the ratings that you would get from NCTQ.”

Still, Mahony says Ohio colleges of education are already working together to improve, and are in talks with legislators about changes, such as making colleges of education more selective.